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In my experience it really depends on the user is sharing the information and their Facebook privacy settings. If the user has everything open to the world, then it stands to reason that a Google bot will see these as well. Google has stated that Facebook and other social media sites have been given more weight to their organic rankings, but it is hard to say how much. Either way, I strongly suspect that this trend will continue.

ALSO, Google does rank the influence of the user sharing the post. If a user has a lot of 'trust' then that share will be worth a lot more than say a new Facebook user. Something to keep in mind.

I would treat social links with a fair amount of caution and avoid getting caught up in the hype. While there have been a lot of great tests that clearly show some type of pattern - none of them have been scientific. Google mentioned that they look at social signals (but quite possibly, for the most part, on /realtime search) and Bing did openly admit they take them into account for web rankings. However the extent is not clear.

My advice is to embrace social media platforms for what they are and what they can achieve outside of SEO. In other words, stick to traditional link building strategies for the most part. However I would also advise to keep a very keen eye on social signal development.

My personal opinion is that there are holes in a lot of the signals Google use already. Why create thousands more by adopting social signals into the algo?

Despite my abundant skepticism, I'm sure that social signals will become very influential in the not too distant future.

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